Sun Tuesday launched the latest assault on the proprietary Microsoft Word document format by offering a new Sun Grid utility service that will convert Word files into ODF.
Another Sun Grid utility will convert text files into audio files for podcasts or for playback on Web sites, said Tom Goguen, vice president with Sun’s software group.
Now provides a practical solution to a problem that will face many places and governments, if they switch to ODF. Hope they make more utils to give people ideas of what else can be done.
Interesting — I’d love to hear a sample of what that would sound like. Is it going to be like Apple’s Victoria voice or is it going to be somebody actually reading this stuff into a mic? I’m guessing the former which really makes we wonder how useful it will be to the general population. It will, of course, still have its uses in niches but I don’t think that a niche is the intended audience.
Interesting — I’d love to hear a sample of what that would sound like. Is it going to be like Apple’s Victoria voice or is it going to be somebody actually reading this stuff into a mic? I’m guessing the former which really makes we wonder how useful it will be to the general population.
“The great classics of modern literature, as read by Stephen Hawking.”
Sun do have its own speech technology for quite a while.
http://research.sun.com/speech/
Here’s an open source implementation of speech synthesizer (text-to-speech) by Sun — http://freetts.sourceforge.net/ .
funny how the vultures are circling the MS document formats!
Yup, we’re trying to get rid of it, so we can control our own data
Na, personally, I’d just like to see Balmer come out and finally show a little humility; SUN did that, after years of Microsoft bashing; maybe Microsoft can do the same after years of bashing open standards – claiming they ‘inhibit innovation’ and opensource bashing by claiming that making software opensource devalues intellectual property.
Schwartz also mentioned this in his blog, good scenario.
http://blog.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=the_future_of_office…
It takes a grid to “convert Word files into ODF”?
Hmmm, maybe MS is onto something here. After all, if you have to have that intensive of a hardware investment to do this, why would you change?
What’s next, a Cray to convert PowerPoint files into KPresenter’s format?
It takes a grid to “convert Word files into ODF”?
Hmmm, maybe MS is onto something here. After all, if you have to have that intensive of a hardware investment to do this, why would you change?
What’s next, a Cray to convert PowerPoint files into KPresenter’s format?
Funny… *Rolls eyes*